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First time accepted submitter ozspeed writes "I live in Australia where I've been enjoying the luxury of taking legally purchased music and film and ripping them for my personal enjoyment on my digital media devices; all legal and above board in my country. I'm about to move to the U.S. for a few years and wondered if I would get into trouble if I tried to bring them across the border with me. Any Slashdot been in a similar position, or have a good view of the law on this?" The U.S. has claimed broad data-snooping rights at the border (though some common sense may have broken out, too), but I've never heard of anyone hassled for this reason; have you?

Speaking from my own experience of crossing the border *a lot* I can't say I've ever seen or experienced even the slightest interest in my laptop or drives. Maybe they have more time at the land borders than they do at the airports I can't say. I haven't crossed at one of those in years but at the airports there's simply no time to deal with such things.

Depends on the color of your skin and place of birth. My own experience and from stories told to me by other brown skinned people, the US border guards take a great deal of pleasure sending us into the back room for further questioning. At that point they will try very hard to find something, anything, that will justify their refusal to let us into the US, so I wouldn't put it past them to search a targeted passenger's electronics for "evidence."

Airports don't escape this rule, at least not on flights from Canada where the screening is done at the Canadian airport. Personally, I've always been either let through or refused entry after the half-hour interrogation session, but I've heard from others who'd been kept in the back room exactly long enough to make them miss their flight.

Eh, it depends on the customs officer you get, too. I have pretty serious health conditions - heart trouble. I've had surgery. I have a pacemaker/defibrillator. I can walk short distances, etc, but standing in line at an airport for 2 hours is out, so I always get a wheelchair which the airlines are happy to provide. One day coming in to the US this bastard of an ICE officer who was obviously in a foul mood, starts giving me shit for the wheelchair, even when I told him it belongs to the airline, not to me. He seemed to think I was trying to smuggle something into the country inside it or something. Anyway he sent us to the area where they review stuff, and my wife and I got searched. The American Airlines airport wheelchair was x-rayed. Obviously they didn't find anything, and sent me on my way. But when you get a despotic official hell bent on ruining people's day, it will happen no matter what your skin color. And yes, I'm white, blonde, blue eyes, and my wife is also white.

I have crossed at land borders multiple times carrying both a laptop and an MP3 player, both containing ripped media. I can report that traveling between the US and Canada, there has been no interest from either Canadian or American authorities in my equipment's contents. I am a US citizen, though, so your experience may vary.

Since ICE is under DHS, and they've basically said they can search your laptops... it falls within the mandate of ICE to now police copyright.

I can entirely believe that (if not now, soon), they might start saying that if you've got ripped media you can get detained. Once your border folks are an extension of policing copyright for industry, this is an entirely plausible scenario.

Since ICE is under DHS, and they've basically said they can search your laptops... it falls within the mandate of ICE to now police copyright.

I can entirely believe that (if not now, soon), they might start saying that if you've got ripped media you can get detained. Once your border folks are an extension of policing copyright for industry, this is an entirely plausible scenario.

that's not what I meant. I meant they can't check if it's legally ripped or not.

that's not what I meant. I meant they can't check if it's legally ripped or not.

Oh, sorry about that.

But, really, as far as the media companies are concerned, there is no 'legally ripped' as they don't recognize your right to format shift music you have purchased. So from their perspective, the border folks should be charging you with violating the DMCA.

Cynically, I wouldn't be surprised if the *AAs have been trying to make it illegal to be in possession of DRM-free MP3s and movies under the assumption you

For the record, I'm an Australian who lives in NYC. I'm very familiar with the policies of both countries.

Australia has some backwards format-shifting laws, prohibiting ripping DVDs under all circumstances for example, so it's inaccurate to pain Australia as better than the US in that regard. We can rip VHS though.

Basically, it's illegal to upload and distribute stuff, or to be making money off ripped items. If you just have stuff ripped for yourself, they are not going to care. If you're really concerned, put it all on a harddrive. If you're really, really concerned, encrypt that harddrive. If you're really, really, really, really concerned upload it and download it later. Internet speed is pretty fucking fast here.

Of course, having gone through customs numerous times with hundreds of burned DVDs, I don't think there is much cause for concern. I'd be much more worried about the UK.

I'm with you on this one... The question is just asking basement dwellers to peek out from under their tinfoil hats out and speculate on how much the NSA wants your Steely Dan collection. To summarize: Nobody at the border really cares about your music collection, especially if it's sitting on the hard drive of your laptop or media device. You're gonna hear a lot of folks here make a big deal about encrypting your drives, doing this that and the other. Don't pay attention to those guys, they don't get out much.

You are on the other end of the unrealistic spectrum. The NSA themselves don't care about your Steely Dan collection, but the RIAA does. The RIAA has deep hooks into our law enforcement. While I don't think that the OP has anything to worry about crossing the boarder with his movies and music, the RIAA has gone full nuclear with the might of our law enforcement for sillier things.

I'd vote against encrypting a hard drive. Video files don't look suspicious, but an encrypted volume sure does. Really, having a copy of your legally purchased DVD's isn't illegal here. Making them is. Since you weren't under the DMCA when you made the copies you'd technically be in the clear here, as backup copies are legal in themselves.

If they have no other reason to search your computer, then there is probably a 99% chance that no one will even ask you to turn on your laptop.

On the other hand, if they do have some reason to give your more scrutiny than the average Australian, it may be worth it to prepare for your computer to be searched and/or confiscated. The worst that will probably happen is that you may never see your computer again (or you may get it back after 6 to 12 months, maybe damaged).

Not too many home connections in the US would make that feasible either, assuming we are talking about multi-terabytes of data. Upload speeds generally suck residential connections in both countries (some exceptions exist: FiOS in the US and any NBN or Telstra Velocity FTTH connection in Australia).

I wouldn't even bother with the TrueCrypt - if they discover the partition, it might just attract further checks.

Use the hidden partition. They can't prove it's there. Dump stuff you wouldn't want a complete stranger to see in there, like receipts for all your electronics (silly example). If they insist on brute-forcing it to check for a hidden partition, wish them luck.

True, if you're going to do it, do it that way. My point was more that I don't think it's worth it in the first place. If you have a volume already set up for other purposes by all means, but personally I wouldn't go to the trouble if I was in the OP's situation.

If they have no other reason to search your computer, then there is probably a 99% chance that no one will even ask you to turn on your laptop.

Off-topic, but I've only once been asked to boot up my computer, on a flight out of Italy. Later, on the plane, the passenger next to me tried to boot up her PC, and it kept crashing. She had forced a shutdown mid-boot after the security check and corrupted her boot sector. The ironic bit was that she was a consultant with a certain Big Blue IT company.

This was around the time when they started getting concerned about the threat of false laptops with explosives instead of batteries, so I'm guessing this wa

I cross the US/Mexico border by land every day and I have had work colleagues tell me at least on two occasions that they have had their legit CDs confiscated from their cars, apparently because they were out of their jewel cases. I one case, the CDs were of dubious origin, but it shows that they do pay attention to such things and that apparently they think think they work for the RIAA rather than the HSA.None however have told me their digital devices were inspected for illegal music, and interestingly both colleagues who were hassled were Mexican nationals. Profiling, anyone?

My thoughts as well. If he's crossing the border daily (likely twice daily, once in each direction), his coworkers are probably doing the same as well. Just to throw out some quick numbers and assumptions, if we assume that they've been at this job for 2 years each, then that means that they've collectively crossed the border about 3000 times (2 crossings/day per employee * 250 work days/year * 2 years * 3 employees = 3000 crossings) and had two incidents in total. Not exactly a major problem or something t

My LOGIC goes like this: the DMCA prohibits the act of running DeCSS. If you run a decryption program that spits out a standard ISO/MP4/XviD file, and you're legally entitled to enjoy the content that you purchased, I can't see there being an issue with it.

Frankly, unless you're on a watch list for something else, or acting completely suspicious, I can't see that they would bother you. I've made several international flights in the past 2 years, and each time I've just given over my customs declaration form, which wasn't looked at, and waved on through.

Of course, now the NSA is probably going to tip of ICE to your evil plot to bring illict digital copies of 'Men at Work' records into the US.

I travel into and out of the USA all the time with thousands of songs, dozens of movies and hundreds of books as pdfs for my personal amusement and edification, and it's all on a hard drive the size of a deck of cards. Why would you bring disks? They're bulky! Just dump it all on a TB drive - it'll cost what, $90? Stupendously more convenient.

Why would they care that you're bringing a hard drive? Why would they bother to look at it, let alone make you turn your computer on, attach it to the hard drive and look at its contents? I'm with basically everyone else: just don't bring a pile of dvds that look like bootlegs. If you really want to bring a pile of dvds, you're still probably fine as long as they don't look like bootlegs you bought from a bootlegger... but why would you bring piles of dvds, as opposed to just leaving them digital on a hard

I was in your situation a couple of months ago. I'm an Australian who's just moved (April 2013) to the US for at least a few years, maybe longer. I also had a lot of media on me when I crossed the border (ripped or otherwise). I don't think you will have any problems unless you literally had half a suitcase filled with dodgy-looking burnt DVDs (which looks like piracy and shows up easily on Xray).

Carry your stuff in on a removable hard drive or two or on a laptop and you will just blend in with the millions of other business travellers who enter and exit the US with laptops/storage devices/other computer peripherals every week. Airports are busy places (especially in the US where they seem to be chronically under-staffed compared to Australia), and customs have bigger fish to fry. They are looking for threats to agriculture/disease/pests and illicit drugs, mostly. If you look like a regular dude with a laptop they won't hassle you at all.

And 'welcome' to the US - it can be a pretty frustrating place as a new resident (trust me on this - US systems and processes seem not to consider 'foreigner' or non-resident alien as a use case so it's a complete nightmare doing even mundane daily tasks, until you get a local drivers licence, a SSN etc. Also in most states they won't recognise your existing Australian licence as equivalent, so you'll have to do a driving test to get a local one, hooray. And they don't give a toss about your credit history either so have fun applying for a rental apartment/getting a loan/even getting approved for a contract cell phone etc.)

But bear with it. After a few months once you jump through all the bureaucratic hoops things get a lot easier. Doing stuff here (at any level of government or even within private companies) is inconsistent, arbitrary, piecemeal. But once you're set up and good to go, it's a good place to live. Though you'll want to get a VPN back to Australia to get a fix of decent TV or radio news (ABC, SBS or otherwise) - 'news' here on all networks is mind-numbingly dumbed down and locally-focused.

First a confession. Back in the 1990s I ripped text books. All my fellow PIGS (Poor Indian Grad Students) did the same. We were in India, if Eastern Economy Edition is not available, American text books would cost about half a month salary of a gazetted officer. ( 1800 rs a month, 14 Rs/US$). So you give the book to the local Xerox shop and next day you get a bound copy of a poorly xeroxed book. It would reek of some chemical. Letters would undergo some kind Laplace transformation at the center and fade, both the recto and the verso pages would be on one wide page. Lento would be empty!

Well at the time I got admission to PhD program in USA I wanted to bring those ripped books along, naturally. But was deathly afraid the immigration officer would find these books, and mark me a flagrant violator of copyright, a person unworthy of admission to a great American university, and do in his best soup nazi voice, "no visa to you" and send me back. So I shipped them all using surface mail and crossed the border without any contraband.

That is how I got the U S Federal Government, to aid and abet my flagrant and willful violation of copyright and the intellectual property of the text book companies of America. The poor postal worker lugged that entire box a flight of stairs up and deposited the treasure in my doorstep, some four months later! All those books, Aircraft Performance Stability and Control by Perkins and Hage, Hale, McCormick, Atkins, Timoshenko, Nicholai, and so many other goodies are still in the bottom shelf of my office. I recently had to look one up to understand quarternions, to implement some rigid body transformation of coordinate systems!

Your safest bet would be to stay home. As soon as you enter the US, all your digital devices automatically hook up to a special network run by the US government and transmit all the information about your digital media, your street drug use, sexual behavior, thoughts you thought or ever thought about thinking and if there's any red flags you'll be arrested as soon as the border agent scans your I-94 form.

As an American who travels with some frequency, I'm more familiar than most with how onerous airport security has gotten, and my encounters with border control at numerous other countries have left me saddened at how poorly ours tends to measure up (in terms of politeness, common sense, etc.) Likewise, the US Copyright Act needs a massive overhaul, and the statutory penalties for relatively minor violations need to be completely re-worked, if not abolished -- the current copyright enforcement regime is abho

First, encrypt your stuff with a key that is encrypted with a pass phrase you can remember. Then upload your encrypted stuff to some cloud storage in Europe. Then transfer your encrypted stuff to some cloud storage in USA. Then move to USA carrying normal things loaded with common stuff not encrypted. Once settled in and acquired high speed internet, download your stuff from the cloud storage in USA.

You have to be careful in any English speaking country (and a few others).

ZIP or TAR your files, convert them to base64, print the resulting text, fax it to the US, print again, ocr the text, convert back to binary and unpack.
It's done before to legally get stuff out of the US. Must be good enough for reversed process. Dead easy.

(Kiddin' aside, I've done similar shit to circumvent idiotic security policies. Never had more fun with PuTTY and uuencode.)

(ianal) There have been court decisions that make media shifting very specifically legal. The main problem for US consumers is that it does nothing about the issues of breaking DRM to make your media shifted file. I don't know if the files you got in Australia were protected by DRM or if breaking it to media shift is legal there or not.Of course there are two more points to look out for:

First of all, the customs agents, tsa, and anybody else, have no idea how you got those files, and it's extremely doubtful

Based on my travel experience (2 trips to North America, 1 to the Middle East), nobody really cares about the contents of your laptop. Come on, it's not 1998, pirating stuff over the internet is a lot easier than bothering to carry it physically.What customs are usually interested about is1) Large quantities of identical stuff which may be contraband2) Illegal items, which oddly enough includes most food. Also drugs, firearms, etc.Security may check your laptop to detect any unaccounted cavities which can c

I don't think you need to make any consideration for bringing ripped music across the border. US customs are not going to search your computer or devices for illegal content. There is simply not enough time in a year to do this for every person entering the country.

(FWIW, the high-profile accusations of Stasi-like behaviour implied that the rest of the world [reuters.com] was being treated like East Germany much moreso than the US itself. Keep in mind that while the NSA may be retaining metadata, they have carte blanche to the same information in every other country. So much for the Pledge of Allegiance.)

That being said, as a Canadian who's visited the US several times, they just don't care. They're too busy to scour everyone's mobile devices. As long as you don't look like you mig

Same here, I'm Canadian and travel to the states often, my mom is in the states. I've never had a problem with my legally owned, but illegally ripped music and movies. Under the DMCA it's illegal to remove digital locks on content, so even though I've bought a movie and have the right to do as I wish with it, it's technically illegal to rip it so I can carry a library of them on a USB stick while traveling. One of those grey areas with the DMCA. As I said, I've never been given a problem crossing the boarde

Vanderhoth is dead on. Ripping a DVD is against the law in the US. The Digital Millenium Copyright act expressly forbids breaking encryption to access content. There are exceptions for security researchers. That said, DVD ripping by ordinary individuals for format shifting and back up is not prosecuted in and of itself. Share the stuff? You can get in all kinds of legal hot water. Lawsuits and prosecution.

Ripping a non-copy-protected Red Book cd that you own is perfectly legal -- provided you do not share the file. No encryption. No crime. First sale doctrine applies. [wikipedia.org]

I travel to and from the US from overseas frequently. Only once in 20 years was I ever polled concerning the contents of my laptop. The US Customs agent asked me if there was any x-rated material on it. I answered truthfully that there was not. He was trolling for a demeanor hit and would have probably looked at my content for illegal porn had he not been satisfied by my confident negative answer. By the way, having even US-legal porn on the laptop can still get you in big trouble in the Middle East so be aware. Even silly rags like Maxim are trouble. Also mind what you eat, kids. Traveling to Dubai? Skip that poppy seed bagel in Sydney airport.. Really. [bbc.co.uk]

Bottom line, however? The posters are generally right. US Customs is not concerned about the technically illegal DVD rips on your hard drive. They probably would do nothing even if they found them. But, and here's the thing. If you are going to feel guilty and worried about that questionable content then leave it behind. You will ruin your flight. Your nerves might show as you cross the frontier and draw unwarranted attention. The fact that you even asked this question shows that this is a source of anxiety for you. You have your answer. Go in peace. Walk in beauty.

Export duties are unconstitutional. Objects imported for re-export are not subject to duty (odd example: a diamond to be used as the lens on a Venus probe was imported without customs duties, because the probe was one-way), either.

A brand new camera purchased out of the US would obviously be of interest to the Customs Inspectors. An old one, too, although at a lower valuation (people wanting European luxury cars used to be told to take a trip there, buy it, and drive it for a few weeks so that it was lega

What if you have songs illegally downloaded from P2P networks? Would that be considered contraband? If that's illegal, how do you prove your music came from an actual CD you own?

I wouldn't prove anything. Personal copies without further redistribution are implicitly legal regardless of the source of the copy, as per article 30, subitem 1 of the Czech Copyright Act (Act No. 121/2000) and as per Czech Supreme Court ruling 5 Tdo 234/2009 which elucidated and confirms the interpretation of article 30. These conditions locally apply even to US copyrighted works, as per the Berne Convention of 1896 which is binding for all of its signatories (both the US and the Czech Republic signed it)

It's personal property. It's not contraband. You are allowed to own back-up copies of your CD's and DVD's. Do you really think that they would make everyone empty out their iphones and mp3 players, or go through them track by track to see if they match a purchase at the itunes store or whatever? No. Well actually the way the US is acting nowadays - maybe...

Yours is a stupid answer. It's a legal copy of a copyrighted work, and the US does recognize the concept of legal copies of copyrighted works.

Also note that heroin is legal in the US. You just have to have a DEA license to handle it. (And there are probably rules regarding its prescription and administration - I'm neither a doctor nor an American to know these minutiae.) The question of importing it is a completely different one, just like with, say, importing food as a tourist (it's not because food is ill

I know for a fact that heroin is used in UK hospitals. I'm not sure about the US though, I think they don't hand out too many "licenses" for it, rather preferring the other drugs like meperidine, fentanyl, morphine, etc. I'm a doctor - but not a US doctor.

Creating "back ups" of your copyrighted data is legal, but copying the data is not legal, which creates a chicken and egg issue. But if the copy was created where it was legal, the copy itself is fine for personal use.

(And there are probably rules regarding its prescription and administration - I'm neither a doctor nor an American to know these minutiae.)

Heroin can never be prescribed for a patient (nor marijuana nor LSD) according to Federal regs. It *can* be used for research purposes, but those licenses are harder to get than one for a working 50 caliber machine gun with ammo. Importing nuclear weapons might be easier (we had a project to import Russian surplus nukes to be spread into our reactor fuel), but I would not bet either way on the question.

Bad analogy. There is nothing illegal in the US about owning a rip of a DVD. In fact, the law specifically states you are allowed one (1) copy for backup purposes. Unless you're downloading stuff in front of the customs officer, what is he going to do? Of course if your computer loads utorrent when started, and you have files on your HD saying stuff like "thanks for downloading warez at xxx.net site", then that might be incriminating enough - IANAL. But just having the rip? Rename it to "SomeMovie(Backup).avi" or whatever and you're 100% covered.

Using your example, it's more akin to you crossing the border while under the influence of heroin. So long as you don't act in an intoxicated/disorderly manner, there is no law against being high. The laws cover possession, distribution and sale.

Then they'll detain you for having encrypted data on your hard drives under the supposition that only someone doing something illegal would resort to encrypting their data.

The States is a wonderful country for contradictions, Encrypt your data to protect your privacy then they use it as the basis for a suspicion of illegal activities detainment. Gather a store of food and water so that you can survive a natural disaster and be detained as a possible terrorist for hoarding food to survive the coming attack

Actually, because the US is one of the few countries that tax their citizens' worldwide income (even those who have permanently left the US), a foreigner or short-term resident being 'given' US citizenship is indeed a bit of a punishment. They'll have the 'fun' of filling out US tax returns for the rest of their life.

Sure. Just go grocery shopping and you'll see your tax dollars at work in the checkout line.
The problem I have with ever-expanding government food programs is that it drives the prices up for those of us living independently.

forget the drugs and weapons. one of two big concerns when entering is food, the US doesn't want pests contaminating agriculture. The other is foreign goods, if you have a bunch of new ready-to-sell merchandise in wrappers you're going to pay a tariff at least....

Er, upload speeds are usually nowhere near download speeds, thanks to ISP's insisting on fashioning their bandwidth that way - greedy little fucks. So yeah, good luck uploading those 500GB of movies and songs. What year did you say your trip was again?

I have some photos that I took in my decoy partition. Never been asked to decrypt it yet, but have heard 'agents' in more than one airport mention in conversation that anything encrypted raises some kind of red flag.

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the Plutocratic States of America, and to the authoritarian state for which it stands, one Nation under surveillance, wiretapped, with incarceration and police abuse for all.

Moving to a new country and all he cares about is music and movies. Get a life brah.

Perhaps he cares about his life (not minutia such as music and movies), and he's heard stories about how "in someone's pocket" are the world's law enforcement agencies via its politicians and their lobbyists. Check a dictionary for the meaning of the word capricious. The last time I went through Customs, they confiscated my screwdriver and pair of pliers. They ignored the multitool with a three inch razor sharp blade hanging on my belt.

The most I have ever been asked is to be able to turn on my music device (CD player and eventually iPods) to ensure it is in running order. In fact the only hassle was having a dead phone, I had to charge it up a few minutes to show them it could turn on. This was back around 2001 after 9/11 and wanted to make sure it wasn't an improvised bomb. Not sure they even do that now. I've never heard of someone having to hand over their computer to be looked at.